The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Henry came home happy, tired and on the brink of scurvy’
It’s a moment that all parents have to face: the first formal declaration of holiday independence. “Er, mum, dad, once GCSEs are over, I was thinking of heading off to Cornwall/Kavos/the Reading Festival with a few friends – that’s OK isn’t it?” For most of us this scenario feels very far from OK. Bringing up children, I’ve come to realise, involves 10 years of nurturing, protecting and shielding from harm, followed by 10 years of gradually casting off the reins and setting them free. The second decade is infinitely harder.
There’s the first night of unsupervised camping in the garden, the first solo bike ride to school, the first teenage party sleepover and, toughest of all, seeing them off on their first holiday without adult supervision.
In our case, our son Henry, aged just 16, was hell-bent on going to Cornwall with a group of seven boys from school.
They’d found a cheap surf lodge in Newquay and couldn’t wait to hit the beaches and – though, naturally, they didn’t mention this – the nightlife. Everyone in his year was going away, he assured us; not a single parent had expressed doubt, and we’d blight his life forever if we said no.
Every instinct made my husband and me want to refuse, to ask Henry to hold off for another year or so. This was not long after a 16-year-old boy, Paddy Higgins, died in a cliff fall after a post-GCSE night out in Newquay. Fearsome thoughts arose of rip currents, alcohol poisoning and spiked drinks.
On the other hand, we had to give Henry the space to stand on his own feet and, perhaps, make his own mistakes. We knew and liked the boys he’d be going with; they were a close group and would look out for each other. We spoke to some of their parents, who had similar anxieties, but felt that we should trust them. We checked reviews of their surf lodge, which sounded grubby but not sinister, and extracted promises about keeping away from cliffs and currents. They were to text regularly.
It helped to know that the Newquay authorities had, since Paddy Higgins’ death, clamped down on underage drinking, and that the streets and beach were regularly patrolled during the GCSE summer migration. And conveniently, the parents of one boy in the group would be on holiday that week just a few miles away. So, taking a deep breath, we said yes.
There were pursed lips from some parents we knew, who felt that 16 was much too young for an unsupervised holiday, and suggested that we were being naive, irresponsible and letting the side down. Perhaps they were right, I wondered all week. Were we taking a terrible risk by allowing the boys to go?
The moment at which you let your child fly solo has to be an individual choice for each family. If we’d had a wild, or a very unconfident child – who wouldn’t feel able to say no – perhaps we’d have decided differently. Alcohol, and unsupervised drinking, are a concern for parents, but while some teenagers can drink the town dry, others are pretty abstemious. A friend’s 16-year-old daughter is off to a mobile home in Westward Ho! this summer with three girlfriends. “It’s their first trip without parents,” she told me. “But I’m pretty relaxed about it. None of them is really into drinking and the worst that’s likely to happen is that they fall out over which pizza topping to have.”
I’m not sure that Henry and his friends were abstemious, exactly, but in the end we felt we’d made the right choice. The boys had a whale of a time and Henry came home exhausted but happy, possibly on the brink of scurvy, and with his hair streaked a strange orange blond. He was also that bit more confident about managing on his own, while we as parents had moved another step towards letting go.
When Joanna Symons’ son reached 16 and asked to go on his first adult-free holiday, it was time to take a deep breath...